The Past and Present of Privacy and Public Life (with Tiffany Jenkins)

A paradox of our time is our willingness to bare all to strangers while worrying about who exactly is watching us online and anywhere else. Listen as author Tiffany Jenkins discusses her book, Strangers and Intimates, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. In this wide-ranging conversation, they explore the role of Martin Luther, J. S. Mill, reality TV, and social media, among other factors, in creating the norms of the public and private spheres over time and today.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is April 23, 2025, and my guest is author Tiffany Jenkins. She was last here in January of 2023, talking about plunder, museums, and marbles. Her latest book, which is our topic for today, is Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. Tiffany, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Glad to be here.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  I want to let listeners know that some of our conversation today may involve adult themes, so if you are listening with young children, you may want to act accordingly. I want to start with the title of the book. It's a beautiful title. And after, when I first got the book, and I thought, strangers and intimates, hmm, that's an interesting title. And after I finished the book, just that framing of the topics you discuss, the rise and fall of private life and so much more, it really resonated with me. So start by talking about why you chose that title and what it means to you.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Well, I originally wanted to write about private life and privacy. And as I was thinking about it, I was reading about 19th century Britain. And this was a time when there was a huge influx of people into cities, Manchester and London in particular. And society, one commentator described it, was a society of strangers. And I had this insight, really, that private life is also defined by public life, the two kind of...

• 2:10Speaker 01

  To kind of help shape each other's sense of themselves, if you like. And I was very struck by the sense of all these strangers on the streets and in the bars and in in kind of political life, then retreating home to a site of intimacy and domesticity and somewhere away from public life, that hence the couplet. So what I try and do in the book is look as much at the shaping of public life and how it defines private life as private life itself.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  And of course, the boundary between the two has changed so extraordinarily over the last 500 years. I mean, the thing that, after reading your book, the thought that I had about strangers and intimates is that in some dimension,

• 2:56Speaker 00

  there's a current in modern culture to break down that distinction. And of course, your book is deals with this constantly, but just thinking about it in this strangers versus intimates, that there should be no strangers. We should be intimate with everyone. And in particular, I should have no secrets. I should have no public versus private persona. I should be open to the world and share. And the the very idea of private versus public,

• 3:38Speaker 00

  the very idea of intimacy versus a stranger is a barrier to be destroyed. Is that? Do you agree that that's a that there is a push toward that in our culture?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, I think in numerous ways, the sense that you might be different in public to how you are in private is demonized, if you like, it's seen as phony. The great kind of mantra of the moment is to be, they're false. You know, in all reality TV programs, the kind of the bad person is always described as false and inauthentic. There is a sense that secrets are. Um baggage to be aired, you know, there is a sense in which that they they bring you down. Um, and I think that does two things. It's sort of, it degrades public life. Because actually, when you go out the door and you may be put on a suit, also relatively unfashionable,

• 4:36Speaker 01

  you become a kind of manners, you you talk about, um, you don't necessarily, it's really interesting, actually, the the drive towards kissing, social kissing, I don't know if that's a thing where you live, but um, in Britain, you you social kiss everybody, your your colleagues, um, and people, I think, we're British, we're quite uncomfortable with that sort of thing, but it's it's definitely seen as kind of, if you don't, you're stiff.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And I I think the sense that if you are different in public than private, then you're being a hypocrite. And it's a much, it's much, it's much healthier and more authentic to be kind of, to to let it all out, to express yourself.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Do you socially kiss twice in Britain, left and right cheek, or is it one?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, because I think any type of um, social etiquette is frowned upon, there's no consensus, which is the bizarre thing. That's a beautiful thing about manners, when there's a consensus about how you might behave, so that you know how to behave. At the moment here, you, people sort of go for one and then prevaricate over the second, and it's just generally very awkward. But you have this general kind of surge of intimacy in in private life, in in public life, rather, people talking about that, their family life is a way of showing that they're they're a good person. Um, it it kind of degrades public life.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  I I would argue, and I think you do in the book as well, that it it also degrades private life. But I I want to go back to the, just that one phrase you used, just that if if you're different in public than you are in private, you're a hypocrite. Of course you are.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  But is that good or bad? That's the question. We just assume hypocrisy is a negative. What do you think?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Well, I think we have different parts of ourselves. And that is, you might be more professional. If you're a professional person, there are certain ways of behaving, whether you're a laborer or an academic, that you wouldn't behave like that at home. And the beauty of the home or the private is that you can sometimes not be your best self. You can let off steam. You can have a row about whatever it might be, doing the dishes or whatever. It is a place of emotional release where you aren't subject to scrutiny. And there's a certain form of accountability within intimates, but it's not kind of a public scrutiny.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  I think that we are in danger of eroding that kind of sanctuary, really. I think we have to accept that we are different in public and in private. There are different facets of ourselves, and they benefit each other. It's not false or phony.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  This morning, I showed my wife

• 7:21Speaker 00

  a video that I found on social media that I found quite amusing. I'm not going to tell you what it was because it's embarrassing that I found it amusing. But as you point out, it's kind of a nice thing that I get to enjoy this very immature and silly video that you might judge me for enjoying. My wife probably does too, but... Put that to the side.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  But that's marriage.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  But that's marriage, exactly. But she forgives me tomorrow, and a relative stranger might judge me for a long time for finding it amusing. But I think there's something else going on. But to get at it, I want to take something you, of course, deal with in the book in different ways, which is, oh, you know, privacy is only necessary if you're a criminal or some kind of pervert, right? If you're a good person, you have nothing to hide. And so this obsession we have with surveillance or privacy, that protects bad people.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  What's your thought on that?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Well, privacy does protect bad people. It does impede accountability and scrutiny, but it's also necessary. And it's necessary for all good people, too. It's a place of self-development and personal autonomy, where we develop our inner life, where we kind of go through a process of self-evaluation, as well as emotional release and messing around and experimenting. But it's also really essential. I mean, you talked about your wife. It's essential for intimacy, because she does know you. And she knows parts of you that nobody else knows. When you're embarking in a relationship, it might even be a friendship, at the beginning,

• 9:15Speaker 01

  you do tell somebody else something about yourself that makes you vulnerable, that you don't want anybody else to know. And that's a very precious thing that is eroded if you don't have any privacy. And everybody needs that. Equally, you need it, I think, for people need it for forms of group privacy, for solidarity. It might be professional colleagues. It might be a community group that you're in. You talk about things that affect you together in private before maybe taking it to your boss or taking it to somebody else. So it's a kind of testing, a testing ground for experimental thoughts and ideas before you go out and say, this is what I think, this is what we want.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Everybody needs.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  I love that, but I think it's more than that, right? It's a gift we bestow that we don't bestow on everyone. And that connects us in a way that I don't get connected to other people. And in many, many ways, our social life.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  And your book stimulates wonderful thinking on these issues. Our social life is how we choose which boundaries to breach with how many people. Many people have things they only tell their wife or never tell their wife, their spouse, or only tell their spouse and a few intimate friends, family members. And some people get on podcasts and tell all. And the question is whether that's a good thing. And the idea that embarrassment or shame or people judging you could hinder you from

• 11:09Speaker 00

  doing those things and thereby reduce your ability to explore who you might want to become, I get that. But I think it's also just my connection to you, my connection to you versus my connection to my spouse versus my connection to my listeners. My listeners, we have a certain intimacy because we spend a lot of time together. They spend a lot more time with me than I've spent with them now, which is really a strange and interesting thing in modern life. But there's always this question of this connection I have with you that's unique or precious or special. And if I share that with everyone, is something lost? I think there is. It's hard to put into words, though.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think something's lost in the relationship. There is a kind of, in the exclusivity of you telling somebody else, this one person, something, that exclusivity bonds you. I mean, secrecy is that kind of double-edged sword, so it also can be isolating. But it's certainly essential for that. But I think if you follow it through, telling everybody everything, I mean, I think you become shallow, as Hannah Arendt once sort of described it. She described it more like a kind of, privacy is a bedding soil where you are underground and you need that to grow.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Without it, you just, you wouldn't grow, you wouldn't blossom. So I think there's something about the kind of, you know, when you've been in the, this is a funny example, but you know, when you've been in the sun too long and it burns. I think not having privacy is like that. You're constantly exposed.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's a nice image. I don't think we understand it fully until we've lost it. And of course, you chronicle Monica Lewinsky in the book, which is a horrific example of exposure unimaginable when you think back on it. And it was interesting to revisit it, having lived through it. But it's, you know, we're talking about sharing things, but of course, sexual jealousy and marital jealousy and romantic possessiveness, which again is sort of, that seems a bit immature to be, to care about. I mean, why not share this specialness that you have?

• 13:43Speaker 00

  And yet, our nature does not feel that way, for most of us, not everybody, but for most of us.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I think for most of us, that's right. And then I think maybe for those that experiment a bit more when they're younger, settle down at some point with one person. And there is the kind of, the cadidian pleasure of just sharing the everyday, the domestic life. And I think also, you do go through difficult times together, difficult times that you don't want people to know about. And they may be difficult between you, but that does, it's a bonding exercise that, you know, through a kind of exclusivity and sharing those private moments comes commitment and loyalty and things that are, you know, really important sustaining forces for the individual.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  There's a poem by Robert Browning I used to love when I was younger. Haven't read it for years, but your book pushed me back to it, which is "The Last Duchess", which is a haunting and quite creepy poem about a duke who resented that his wife...

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Smiled at someone other than him, that his 900-year-old name, which brought her pleasure, was no different than the bouquet of flowers that, quote, "some officious fool" brought her. That she smiled at everything, and he did not like that lack of discrimination. Now, that's a form of jealousy. But surely, that is getting at some aspect of human nature that I think is important to us.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  We all want to be chosen.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  And we want to be chosen for ourselves, not for the flattery that we've given another person, not for the flowers that we can send easily.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  There's a very nice thing, there's a very nice moment in Sally Rooney's book, Ordinary People. Is that the right title? Where Connor talks about how being with his girlfriend, I can't remember her name, but I just remember this passage so vividly, when he says, "It's like shutting the door to everybody else, and he can say anything to her." And their relationship's not the most functional, but they have this, the book has this tremendous kind of sense of the privacy they have within each other, which isn't solely physical. It's not because they've gone away from everybody else. It's the relationship that they have, that only they two know each other in the way that they know each other, and nobody else does.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  And I suppose it's a place of discrimination, really. I choose you.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. I want to look at one more aspect of this before we move on. This question of only criminals need to be afraid of surveillance or transparency. And I think there's a very deep issue here about the imperfection of language. So you and I are talking about a book. It's about 400 pages. I read it over the last two weeks. And I learned a lot about you. I learned a lot about what you're trying to communicate to me. But of course, the human mind and language is imperfect.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And if you and I having this conversation, if we imagine we're having it over Zoom, for those of you listening to the audio only, we're having this over Zoom. I can see your face. I can see your raised eyebrow. I can see your smile. I can see your sneer. I haven't seen that yet, but I could if you did. And so we're communicating in this very complex human way that we have. And it's remarkably imperfect. And you can imagine sort of three levels. There's this four levels. You and I in the same room, which actually is nothing like what we're doing right now over Zoom, because it's both more intimate, but also less, because it could be tense.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  We could be uncomfortable being in each other's physical presence. I've had that many times with people I've interviewed. It's very, for many people, it's easier to be on Zoom. So you go from the physical face-to-face to Zoom, which is two dimensions. Then we could think about just the audio. And then we could think about a transcript. And if you go from each of those levels, something is lost, sometimes something's gained. But I think the thing that is hard for us to appreciate is the imperfection of our communication in all those modes. We misunderstand each other. Nuance gets missed. You didn't see that I was winking, and you took something that I was making a joke about seriously.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  And the person who reads the transcript alone, and this, by the way, I think is a huge problem with modern life, where we're constantly communicating over WhatsApp and via email hurriedly. So many mistakes are made in how we connect with each other. And the danger to me of transparency and of the loss of privacy is that it's not that I'm going to try something and it might not go well, and at least it's only the two of us, so it's okay. It's that I actually meant something totally different. I thought it was totally normal, but you misread it or misunderstood it or didn't hear the tone in my voice or only read the words.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  And I see those, that subtlety in human relations is what's lost when we breach these barriers and make snap judgments.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  That's a very interesting point. I'm just thinking about the times in which I've felt most on show, not necessarily doing a talk or something like that where I know what I'm going to say, but in certain political discussions at the moment, you feel very exposed. And what happens, I think, is there's a tendency to rely on literalness. And so ambiguity goes out of the window, comedy goes out of the window, irony, forget about it, anything that could be misconstrued, which is basically everything, because there's so much ambiguity in all our exchanges. And I think that's what transparency sort of

• 20:23Speaker 01

  leads to, is kind of false literalness. And it's much reduced as a result.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  You know, it's an interesting example of how people think about translation. They think that the more literal the translation, the more accurate it is, which is totally false. But it makes sense. It's just wrong, totally wrong.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Equally adaptations of films, of books you've loved, which follow the plot exactly or this description, but they miss something of the heart. Sometimes they miss the oddity of it, because they just have to kind of follow the script so rigorously. I suppose it gets rid of the messiness of life.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. The only other thing I'd add is that everybody has something to hide.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hiding's not bad. I think the thing is, keeping some things for certain people and not showing everybody everything is not a bad thing. We all do have things. There are things I don't want people to know about me, but they're not necessarily bad or illegal. They are private. I mean, there are certain experiences that, you know, love's a curious one, because there are certain things we do want at some point to make public about it. Marriage is a public institution.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Wedding rings are public, but there are aspects of love that you would never make public, equally death. I was really struck when David Bowie died a few years ago and he hadn't, he hadn't announced that he was going to die, but he had terminal cancer. You can hear it now in his songs, but he made no public declaration. And there was a sense in which, you know, his fans felt as if they'd been deprived of something, that they were indignant that he hadn't let them know. And I think there are some experiences in life that are just, they're just big and weighty and not that subject to, I mean, you can rationalize that, you can be rational about them, but they are unruly. And that's

• 22:26Speaker 01

  why they should be hidden, in a way.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  The example of the celebrity who dies and quote, betrays the fanbase because they don't, they find out afterwards. I mean, that's the way you should feel about your family members. And there's an illusion there. The illusion is, is that you're close to that person. And we do feel close sometimes to a celebrity, but it's an illusion. We're not close to them. And we're not entitled to, to witness their dying months or their dying moments, unless they choose to, to share them, and they can, some do. But we feel as, we feel betrayed. And that's an aspect of modern life that is just so alien

• 23:12Speaker 00

  to most of human history. Again, I'm not going to judge it. I don't know if it's good or bad. It's definitely a reality.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's, yeah, you're, we're treating intimates, we're treating strangers like intimates. And to a degree, with the exposure of private life to scrutiny, we end up treating intimates like strangers, because we can't be fully intimate with them.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Because we won't, I mean, you won't, if, if you're exposed all the time, that you will not be intimate. You know, they, you look at sort of the accounts of, or their attempt, that you look at the accounts of Russia, when, or Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. And, you know, people talk about being unable to talk to their children, because their children could easily accidentally just report them. And then they would be taken off, taken off to prison or worse. So it kind of, that their, their family life and their intimate life was much reduced.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's a strange and bizarre thing to think about what it would be like. When I was reading your book, I was thinking about a moment. This is 50 years ago. And it was a workshop. It was a presentation of a seminar paper. The speaker was Victor Fuchs. He was a health economist at Stanford University and was giving a workshop, presenting a paper at a workshop of, at the University of Chicago. It was Gary Becker's workshop. Becker was known for his caustic and really, I hate to say brutal, but brutal takedowns of the speaker. I've been a speaker in that workshop twice. It's a challenging experience.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  And the workshop was on privacy, the paper. And Victor Fuchs, the speaker, said about halfway through the talk, "Now imagine a world where all of your thoughts were broadcast onto a screen." And of course, we're in a world that's something like that right now. It's not forcible, but we choose often to broadcast many of our thoughts on the screen. And Gary Becker said, "You know, Victor, I don't think you'd like to see what you'd see if that screen were here now." Because the workshop hadn't gone so well up to that point.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  But that whole idea of exposing judgment and, again, just transparency. Nothing's hidden. Weird world.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yes. And as you say, there is a degree in which we're living in that world at the moment. And as you say, it's not forced. Nobody's forcing us to upload our messages and put everything on WhatsApp and send it to loads of people and then leak them. Technology facilitates that, but nobody's being made to do it. It's the culture in which, and people don't seem to think that maybe they should just be quiet.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Well, it's an interesting question, right? You say they're not forced, but there's strong incentives in our world to share. Because you're judged for not sharing.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  You know, I will sometimes review things on Twitter, on X, and say, you know, "I loved this book," or "I hated this movie," or... And my wife will say, "Why are you sharing that?" It's a good question. And I say, "Well, people like it, they're interested." It's... maybe I shouldn't, I don't know. I don't know.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think there are a number of things. There is this cultural push that if you don't share, if you don't talk about your feelings, then you're seen as an odd person. And there is something about it where it's currency. You know, it's currency of social interaction that I think does make me slightly uncomfortable. And then I think there's probably other social factors, which is the communities that you might have shared that with have degraded somewhat. And so rather than talking to people in our lives, near to us, communities of interest,

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I think we end up talking to strangers and then expect them to behave as if they know us, which is a peculiar thing. I think there's a degree to which as well, people are seeking different forms of recognition. Recognition that they exist, recognition that they're liked, that they matter. And doing that with strangers in this climate is likely to make them feel bad because the kind of... We don't have sort of rules and etiquette for how to behave in that way. That is... we become sort of uncivil, I think, as a matter of course.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Have you ever had a stranger confess something deeply personal to you?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. I mean, I think the thing is about strangers do tell you things and because there's no comeback, you know, the stakes are less high and it does forge a kind of momentary intimacy, which is fleeting. But if they knew you, if they knew that they were going to see you again on Monday morning, they probably wouldn't, they probably wouldn't tell you. But it's probably a release for them.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you know, I haven't quoted this in a long time on the program, but my, my great, I think it's my great, great grandmother or my great grandmother used to tell my father, if you're, if you get depressed about something, go out and tell a rock.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Right? Go out and tell a tree. Speak, speak, you know, get it out to someone who can't judge, to something that can't judge you. And I think that's what that, those stranger admissions are about. They need, we need sometimes to tell someone, but we need it to be without judgment because they're not going to see us again, or we hope they won't. But it's hard to keep that, that secret. Actually, it's a handful of times in my life and it's, I find it, I found it exhilarating. There is an intimacy that is forged. It's something of an illusion, right? But it's, it can be very, very powerful.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, I think it's real, because I've had that as well. I think it's just not permanent.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And, and that's why it feels like an illusion. But I think you, you can remember those, you can remember as we're speaking what those occasions are.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  I remember them vividly and I'm not going to tell you.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Let's, let's look, let's go to the book directly. Your book opens to the surprise of this reader. With an account of Martin Luther. What's he have to do with this story?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well, and it was a surprise to me as well. I thought I was going to start in the Victorian age when you have the Walter and Brandeis infamous article, the right to privacy. There were similar kind of privacy concerns in Britain. But then I just thought, well, where did it? How did Victorian society come to value privacy? It can't, it's not a natural thing. You go back to the 17th century and people talk about privacy as something that's dangerous. You know, flee it. If you're, if you're in private, you're doing, you are definitely doing something wrong. The echoes of today. So I tried to think, where does it, where does it come from? And certainly there's a degree in which it comes from property. So, you know, the property being secured and all the rest of it.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  But how did that happen? You know, that, that, those are sort of, those are, those are ideas about restricting borders, setting up borders between the authority of the day and the individual. And so I looked for those struggles around kind of the border between the individual and authority. And there you, that brought me to battles over conscience and religious liberty, not, not conscience as we would understand it today, you know, doing what I want to do, basically following my own true beliefs. But the sense in which to follow the faith, to follow my faith, I would have to go against the authority of the day at great risk to myself. And that's what, I mean, I look at Martin Luther and I also look at Thomas More.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  I mean, both followed their conscience. In their mind, for Martin Luther, he was following scripture against the Catholic Church. And for Thomas More, it was the Catholic Church. But in so doing, they both, I think, added to a situation where the gap between public conformity and public devotion and private faith kind of split open, you know, split open and began to extend. And you had particularly in England with the flip flopping over religious faith. People following their own faith in private before they were allowed to do so.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I think there was a degree to which with Protestantism as well, the reliance upon the book and

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And the kind of translation of the Bible into the vernacular, whether it's German, from Latin, or English, did foster a kind of, an inward kind of self, an inward reflection. So that might have also contributed. And of course, reading, you know, the printing press, which, which kind of pushed Luther's messages out, it did become quite an internal thing. But I see it as a kind of, initially a political thing. How do we restrain the borders or create the border of the state? And then you have with toleration, at the end of the sort of 1670, 1680 in Britain, in England,

• 33:22Speaker 01

  you have the sense in which, because there's been so much bloodshed, you know, fighting over which faith, which, which, which is the true path to God. Thousands and thousands of people died following their own true path to God. There was a sense in which toleration, i.e. you can practise your religious faith at home the way you see fit within certain parameters, was a way to manage that bloodshed. And that, for me, that is a kind of, this is private. Religion is, you know, you've, you've, you can follow certain tenants this way if you do it in private. That is the sense in which there is somewhere separate from state authority.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  So it's a, it's a sort of accidental thing. Nobody set out to do it. But at the end of the 17th century, there was this sense that there is somewhere private away from the reach of the state. And it's, it's written about in Locke and Hobbes to a different degrees. I mean, Hobbes writes beautifully about thought being free. And then Locke talks about, you know, the, the way in which man needs to be, can only follow his conscience if he is free to do so. And thus he is, he's free, free to do so in private.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  It's weird, we're so obsessed with chronicling our lives through photos. And I have, I never throw out an email, hardly, I hardly ever throw out an email. So I have hundreds of thousands of emails in my Gmail account. And then you have a fleeting thought, it's yours, it's private, and you don't write it down. And it's a little bit alarming in today's world to realize you can't get it back. I mean, where's that search for that? I need to, can I just, now, maybe we'll have it someday, right? It's a little, it's a really scary thought, but, you know, the idea that that's the last

• 35:21Speaker 00

  bastion of real privacy are my fleeting thoughts, my judgments, the things that make me laugh inside. And so much of what we do now is surveilled in certain ways, either by our own choice, or by the technology we choose, or by a government if it's a totalitarian state. And the skull is kind of the last, maybe, safe harbor there, I don't know.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  You know, thought is free. I'm struck by, they've just published Joan Didion's Converse Letters, or Notes, to her psychiatrist. And it was not something that she wanted published. And if you look at it, I mean, she's a very precise, particular writer. In three words, you know, she can sum up the crisis of human existence, or grief, just brilliantly. And these are effectively her notebooks, and they don't do that. They're sloppy, and fleeting, and all the rest of it. And it sort of degrades her as a writer, I think. These were not meant for public, but there's this kind of voracious appetite for anything,

• 36:31Speaker 01

  to expose anything that's been kind of hidden.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Do you think Max Brod should have burned Kafka's manuscripts?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  No. I'm sorry, I don't. I mean, I think, I think there are, you know, there are occasions, when you're dead, I'm afraid, you can, you can pass as many, you can write your will and pass as many laws as you like.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  I'll bet her off.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. She should have burned them, she should have burned her own, or left them, yes, yes.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  It's an interesting question. I don't want to miss this. I want to come back to the evolution of these issues. But I love that you made this observation that a hallway in a house was an innovation because it was a way of creating a private space, a room with a door. And as the economist, I'm thinking, at the same time, you're also writing about the rise of the coffeehouses in England and the place where people can socialize. So they can socialize publicly with a group of people in the public space called a coffeehouse.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  And at home, they can be alone with, either by themselves, or with an inmate, a loved one, or a friend, in this room with a closed door off a hallway, which is this crazy innovation. And both of them, I would say, are the results of a rising standard of living, that you have to be wealthy to imagine creating a hallway. Because a hallway is, it's wasted space. And a coffeehouse is such a luxury. You're going to go to another place? I mean, there's all your own houses. Why do you have to go to another place? Well, when you're wealthy, you can afford, as a society, to have these little, slightly different places for interacting.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I think that's true to a point. So we're talking about the 18th century, and two remarkable things happen at the same time. So you have this burst of public life, the coffeehouses that you talk about, where people would go, and it's initially to find out the news, you know, what's happening with the ships in the East, with the East India Company? Is there a war? So they have quite a kind of, they're related to mercantile capitalism. What's happening where?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  They become also a place to talk about kind of politics and they're they're they're open at all hours and people kind of just go in and I think the first thing you have to say really is what news have you sir? It's primarily a male space. At the same time, in the home, yes, rooms are being kind of created for specific functions and the corridor is introduced. It takes a while for it to get on because you do to get kind of integrated into into the home because obviously you do need money to do it. But by the Victorian age, it is it is absolutely essential because every house must have privacy, writes a chap called Robert Kerr, who writes about architecture. How related

• 39:41Speaker 01

  is it to prosperity? That's an interesting question. I mean, but the wealthy beforehand, there were very, very wealthy people in the medieval period, they didn't have corridors. They just would walk from one room into the other, whether you're a traveller or a you know, or a seamstress. And I think that the sense then was that actually the most powerful person in the room did not have privacy because everybody came to show their relationship to them, you know. They weren't private because being close to the most powerful

• 40:21Speaker 01

  person in the room meant that you had power. So I don't think it's entirely prosperity. I think something happens where you get this conception of public life and private life. And that's given form in things like the novel, you know, Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Rousseau's Julie, or even towards the end of the century, Jane Austen's novels. Robinson Crusoe's by Daniel Defoe talks about domestic life for the first time, you know, just the pot and the kettle, even though he's on an island. So there's something that's happening and it's certainly fuelled by prosperity. But it's not just prosperity.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Something's happening with the idea of domesticity and romance and intimacy and the private spirit. Up until that period, there was, I just don't think people

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Valued it in the way that it came to be valued. And of course, you do have with prosperity the separation of the household from the economy. So you're not making everything in the home and selling it in the local marketplace. You're going out to work increasingly. And that that kind of separation, that border, does also carve out it, carve the private sphere out as a kind of special place.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and of course, there's all these different layers of intimacy and strangerness in these different public spaces, right? The office is different than the coffee house, which is different than the bowling alley. And there's certain behaviors that are acceptable or one that the other and.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  But this is when the handshake is invented. So the handshake is introduced as a way, because you wouldn't know. Previously, people would have had a greater sense of who they were dealing with because they would have been a member of the elite. But this is kind of with the bourgeoisie coming in and merchants. There's less of a sense of who is this person? I need to know what they're, you know, I need to have a sense of what their reputation is. But rather than bowing and curtseying, people start to kind of initially to seal deals, shake each other's hands, and then it becomes a kind of a way of acting in public life. You begin, they begin, you know, manners begin, people start to talk about manners. And how do you behave with these people?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Also, with the, with the, you know, new bourgeoisie who are coming in from the countryside to go to parties for the first time, how do we behave? And people start talking about manners, which I think is fascinating.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it starts with the handshake, then it's a kiss, then it's double kiss.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Well, now, yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  And you know what's next? Mixed dancing. Sorry, that's an old joke, which I couldn't help but introduce. And it's a good segue to the next topic, which is there's an immense amount of sex in this book, not in a purient way, but in a very thoughtful and interesting chronicle of how we think about sexual intimacy. And I, you can talk about other aspects of it, but what I want to emphasize for the moment is I think there's a tendency in modern life to think that. Certain social trends began around 1963. Sexual liberation, atheism, right?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  It's that's when we finally threw off the shackles of tradition and authority and we finally liberated the human being the way some people would want that, would want people to be liberated. When you read your book, you realize that a lot of people had doubts about the existence of God. A lot of people did not think they were going to be punished, or at least didn't act that way if they strayed from the straight and narrow. And a lot of people had sex outside of marriage. And I think the way we stylize that experience, or what we think of as that historical experience,

• 44:31Speaker 00

  is grossly inadequate. And after you read your book, you realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That was my take on that. I don't know if you wanted that to come out, but that's the way I felt.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Well, I feel in general, there's a tremendous kind of arrogance in the present period about the past, which is basically, we do it better, they didn't know what they were doing, they're all stupid and horrible. And I think to try and understand any of the gains that we appreciate today, we have to go back and look at how they, where did they come from? They weren't just magicked out of the air by young students who knew better in the 1960s. And you asked the question about Martin Luther, to which I responded that conscience was really important. But one of the fascinating things for me was the 18th century is when people start talking about conscience in intimate life.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  And so, yes, they did, they did all sorts of things beforehand in private, but they were heavily regulated and scrutinized. You know, you had these things called the bawdy courts or the bum courts, which was when local communities had to basically police the morals of their neighbors. And they could legitimately spy through keyholes to do so, and then take them to court where they would be publicly shamed. You know, they would have to walk through the street and with a white sheet and confess and recant and all the rest of it. But the 18th century, you have this tremendous, I would say...

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Quite modern idea of sex coming through, which is, as you say, God is deemed to be less interventionist in day-to-day life, so he's no longer watching everything you do. And people start talking about how their conscience meant that they thought they could properly have sex with this other person. And that extends to, yes, so quite extraordinary cases of lesbian sex, heterosexual sex. This is when you have the development of things like mollyhouses, where men could meet and dance to each other. And compared to what went before, when that just wasn't possible, and this became quite a public thing, it's an absolutely extraordinary thing that does basically warrant the description

• 46:47Speaker 01

  of it being the first sexual revolution, long before the 1960s, in, say, you know, 1811.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. You have a quote from Jean Holm, a married woman that was having an affair with James Boswell, who I'm sure was, I don't know anything, his diaries evidently detail a lot of his activities, which I was not aware of. But he was clearly a fascinating companion intellectually. And you write that she was unwilling, Jean, who was married, when Boswell tried to end his relationship with her, she was unwilling to let go of their, quote, "delicious pleasures." She told him that she loved her husband as a husband and Boswell as a lover, that each had a place and that no one suffered. Quote, "My conscience

• 47:38Speaker 00

  does not reproach me, and I'm sure that God cannot be offended by them." Those delicious pleasures. And this whole idea that this is natural, therefore, God did it, it's natural, so therefore, it's okay, which, again, I think we associate it with the 1960s, is a slightly older idea.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Very much so. And you had Enlightenment ideals and ideas about nationality and what is and isn't natural. There was also the voyages of discovery. And so people would be traveling and seeing that different communities do things very differently, and therefore... Actually, maybe there's more variety in human life than was previously thought. But it's a tremendous, it's a tremendous change. So Boswell is writing his diaries. These are quite early diaries of a man about town. He's, he's writing all about the prostitutes he visits and the mistresses he has. He reflects on whether this is a good thing or not, but he gives, you know, like many, gives, gives way to temptation. But you wouldn't have had that written on the page a century earlier.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  You know, the Puritans wrote diaries, but they were all about praying. Come the 18th century, we have this sudden dramatic change where people talk about sex much more openly.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  I would just add that I think writing about one's own religious feelings is also something that ebbs and flows in, in culture. You know, Gerard Manley Hopkins, it feels somewhat, I feel like a voyeur sometimes when I read his books about how God makes him feel. And, and most people would say that's a private thing. You don't, shouldn't write about it. And partly because you can't put it into words. And, and of course, what an enormous amount of poetry and popular song is an attempt to put into words at something that's fundamentally ineffable, love. But anyway.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  But it does so in a way that's, that there's a tendency sometimes to just try and describe love or art in scientific terms. You know, they look at the brain. It's a very sort of popular thing at the moment. But that's what, that's why poetry succeeds and, and science can't. It may tell you everything about what's happening inside your head, but it can't, it can't really sum up the heart.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. A mystery, a mystery. I, I want to skip rather dramatically to, I mean, in terms of a shift.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Time, yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, and not so much time, but I want to talk about the Mazini affair, which I knew nothing about. The importance of, of a private letter and the gummed envelope.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  So this is a fascinating privacy panic in Britain in around 1844. Giuseppe Mazzini is an Italian nationalist, he would like to see unified Italy. He's on the run for trying to create that very situation and he's given political exile in London, where he becomes the talk of the town, good friends with Carlyle, Dickens. Liberals really fall for him. He's continuing to write in his bedsit, his dank bedsit, to different political revolutionaries.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And the Austrian ambassador becomes deeply concerned about this, so he asks the Tory in charge of the Home Office in Britain to intercept the letters. And they send them off, they do, with no kind of concern for privacy. And he sends them off to the secret office in the post office, where people uncover them, read them, and then seal them back, and then send them off to Mazzini. And he opens them one day and he realises that they've probably been tampered with. This is a time when people are sending, you know, probably five or six letters a day.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Their post is going almost like email. He then asks his friends, he needs confirmation, he asks his friend to send him some envelopes within which are poppy seeds and strands of hair. He receives these envelopes and the poppy seeds and strands of hair have been kind of dropped by the secret clerks in the post office by accident, who don't really know what they're doing. And he knows he has this confirmation. And it becomes a full-blown...

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Argument in the Houses of Parliament and in the Times newspaper. It's a national scandal. What's really interesting about it is that people who do not side with him politically, i.e. the Times and also his friend, Thomas Carlyle, rush to his aid and talk about how he has his kind of sacred privacy has been violated by this opening of the letter. And the scandal reaches far beyond the borders. It comes to the States, you know, it was written about equally in Australia. And I think what it reveals at the time is this deep value that privacy has acquired in British society.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  It is seen as a kind of a violation of the sacred space, a man's private letters. And it is finally resolved by the invention of the gummed envelope, which means that the letter can be can be kind of properly secured, where although it was secured by a stamp that was easily fiddled with and reapplied. So, you know, Victorian society came up with a typically brilliant invention. But it did show that privacy was, and that, you know, in a way that it just isn't now. You couldn't imagine the same sort of scandal. You know, liberals in the in the House of Commons in particular were absolutely outraged,

• 53:39Speaker 01

  and it was just kind of the scandal of the day.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  You write at a little bit of length about John Stuart Mill. He is such a fascinating character. I don't think, I don't know of a movie that's been made of his of his life. There should be. And I don't know of a great biography. There probably is one that I'm just unaware of because I'm a ignoramus. But.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Why is he in this book? And I enjoyed every word of that chapter, by the way, because he's a very interesting person.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  I always liked what he said about, and I think it was he and Harriet Taylor, who talked about the need for experiments in living. That for two reasons, for society and for the individual. That there needed to be this space where people could try different ways of being, thinking and doing. And it might be something that they wouldn't prove of, you know, and it probably wasn't. But they thought it was necessary for the individual because, and if the individual didn't have the kind of, the ability to test things out for themselves, they couldn't become a moral person. Everything would effectively be handed down to them.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  It would be a kind of, create a kind of passive individual. So they were both very interested in kind of self-development and working on the self, to become a better moral actor. But he also thought that, you know, unless you have that kind of private space for experiments in living, unless you have a kind of space for freedom, effectively, society couldn't progress because we couldn't kind of test things out. So I really like Mill. I think he's a very complicated writer, but one that fundamentally respects the private sphere.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Not, not to never be interfered with,

• 55:39Speaker 01

  but generally to have a kind of a private sphere for the individual. And as for a good biography, Richard Reeves.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  I would recommend his, yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Great. And you talk about, you write about the right, quote, "to be left alone", which is a beautiful idea. And that's related to that, obviously.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  It is. It's the same, sort of very similar sort of period, 19th century. That is the Warren and Brandeis kind of American conception of the right to be let alone. And they talk about privacy. Again, it's not so much property, which is recognized in the Constitution. That's more a kind of an earlier idea, but they talk about the modern, the modern individual just needs that kind of space, primarily for a kind of emotional release where they can be off. And that's a very 19th century idea is now, I think you have that kind of, if I look at that kind of phrase, the right to be left alone. Now, I think really from the 1970s onwards, it's the odd person that wants to be left alone in that same

• 56:41Speaker 01

  way. Not the Marley and Adique trick, but the kind of strange man who lives on his own that can't be trusted.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's the, you know, a lot of what we've been talking about is in the first half of our conversation is about extroverts. And we live in an extroverts culture, and introverts are judged. And I think they often want to be left alone. And then, well, what's wrong with them? Why would they want to be left alone? And I want to make sure I give introverts their due, because the default is join in and not stay home. Come out, don't

• 57:30Speaker 00

  stay inside. Share and don't conceal. And that's tough on people who are constitutionally made to be more private.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yes. There's a great, I don't know if you've ever read The Circle, but I can't remember who it's by, David Eggers.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I haven't read it. I'm a big fan of his first book, which I think, which is how he became an orphan. It's a memoir. And it's, I think it's the funniest book I've ever read, which is awkward. I remember reading it in, in a hotel, in the lobby, and I'm laughing out loud. And I'm wondering whether people who are

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Watching May, or who come up and say, "Oh, wow, what's so funny? Oh, it's a book about a man who lost both his parents during a very short period of time." That book, which is called-

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Heartbreaking work of a staggering genius.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Heartbreaking work of staggering genius. But I did not read The Circle, which is evidently a thinly veiled portrait of, is it Apple or Facebook, a tech company?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  A tech company. It doesn't, it's not as profound as staggering work, or as funny, but it's got some very nice observations in it. Number one is the sort of, the desire from the bottom up to expose oneself and be transparent, rather than the top down. So although it's about a tech company, he's not really saying tech is forcing you to be like this. But he's got a very nice line, which is, I think it's after May, the central character, goes paddling in a kayak on her own. And this is deemed as just really strange. "Why would you do that?" And they say something along the lines of, "Sharing is caring, secrets are theft."

• 59:25Speaker 01

  And there's senses like, if you haven't shared it, you've stolen it from other people.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. I want to skip forward a few, a century or so. You write very thoughtfully about a moment in entertainment that I think was an incredible watershed, which was the Loud and Wilkins families. The Louds were in America, and the Wilkins were in the UK. In 1979, Albert Brooks created a documentary called Real Life. I'm seeing it now on the internet. It was his directorial debut.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  It's quite funny, but the reality show, An American Family, which was 1973, about the Louds, for people, I was alive, I don't think I ever saw it, because I'm-

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  I'm a snob, and if I did see it, I would not admit it. But tell us, tell us what that show was. It's hard to, and what it did. It's quite extraordinary.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  I think the idea was to make a sitcom about a family, like the Brady Bunch, or, you know, a well-known American family, but for real. And to get behind the veneer. I think that's the word the producer used himself. To get behind the veneer and show what real life was like. This was a family living in Santa Barbara, relatively prosperous. And inevitably, as the cameras turned on and kept rolling, the messiness of life became evident and discussed in the public arena. So at one point, Pat told her womanizing husband to leave.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Their son was gay and lived quite an openly, quite a hedonistic lifestyle in Chelsea. And the newspaper columnists couldn't get enough of it. You know, they ate it up because once you put your life out there, people judge it. You know, they judge, they judge the daughter for not caring enough about politics. They were really horrible about Lance, the son, calling him a Goya-esque dwarf leeching about. And I think that the thing about it is that their lives were then transformed because they felt, once they become public property, they had to constantly perform, whether it was on the Dick Cavett Show or posing for a magazine. Their lives were changed.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  I mean, remarkably, Pat Ladd, who wrote an autobiography about it, about her life, sort of prefiguring that kind of boom for kind of the confessional type of life story. Although Betty Ford would also do that around the same, around the same period. But she, she still advocated that opening up the doors and showing people your dirty linen was the way to save marriages. But it didn't save hers.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  And what happened when the UK copied it?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  It was very similar. It was a family called the Wilkinson's family. And it was what they, the same sort of thing happened, really. You know, inasmuch as you had a complicated situation, like every family. The woman's, Margaret Wilkinson's son wasn't her son by marriage. It was by an affair. He'd been accepted into the family as his own by Margaret's husband. But it just kind of exposed the difficulties in front of everybody. And they talked to the camera as if they were a friend, you know, as if there was nothing.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  I'm trying not to say nothing to hide, but as if everything was fine to show. Your dirty laundry was fine to show. And they, again, couldn't escape the cameras from there on. And what's remarkable about both families is that, again, they invited the camera in. And I don't think a family, certainly in Britain, would have done that 10 years, 20 years earlier. But there was a sense that, you know, what was usually on television was not real. And we had to show you real life. Unless it's kind of exposed, it's not real. There was, I suppose, a kind of almost, yeah, a quest for recognition.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess transparency is the nice way to say it. Exhibitionism is the not as nice way. And some of that's

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it might begin as openness, but it does end up being exhibitionism. Because you can already see it, you can see it in the development of reality television. At first, people don't really know what it's going to be like. But now, everything's done for the camera. So it becomes exhibitionism. And it's almost as if people feel they don't exist unless somebody's liking them on TikTok or watching them on some sort of reality television program.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Kind of a paradox there that

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  You're only real when you're inauthentic. When you're posing, would be the right way to say it, I think, right? A selfie, chronicling your life via selfies, is a contradiction. If you're thinking of it as being a way of capturing real life. Because what you're really doing is capturing what you think your real life's supposed to look like. And it's always fascinating, being older, watching younger people strike poses, you know, when you're on a vacation in a place where a lot of people are taking pictures. And it's comical to watch from the outside.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  They think they're doing something glamorous or elegant, and it looks like a circus. It's a farce, actually.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  I think, I find it unnerving, I think...

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Well, you're British, Tiffany.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Sorry, it was a cheap shot. It was a cheap shot, I apologize.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  It happens here.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  I'm an Anglophile.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  What strikes me about it is that there isn't a public self there. So, there is that kind of pushing out of the intimate.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  And what you're taking, where you are, in terms of the photograph, is just a backdrop for you. Rather than, it's actually this, you know, the Taj Mahal, I went to recently, and it's, you know, this astonishing building. And everybody's taking selfies of themselves in front of it, which, you know, I'm not saying it's a terrible thing to do, but there is something very me-focused and very, very self-focused. And what's striking about the reality TV programs later on, not initially, is that people are isolated from the world. So, there was, you know, when the Twin Towers, when the planes threw into the Twin Towers,

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  the people on the celebrity television, reality TV program in the States were not told about it.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  And you just think, because all they're valued for is how they are in private. So it's a peculiar thing. In a strange way, they're more public and they're more exposed, but it's not being as public actors. It's being as private selves. So it's that kind of, the only part of them that is sort of deemed important is the private nature rather than the public nature.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  But they're on camera. So, you know, I just mentioned in passing that when I visited the memorial at the World Trade Center, to see someone taking a selfie there is somehow profane. I'm sure they take them at Auschwitz. I'm sure they, people take selfies in lots of places that are what I would deem inappropriate. But it is a fascinating thing to think about, your observation, and it's just, it's a way of saying, me, me, me. And yet, in theory, when you post it, you're sharing.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  You're trying to interact with the world, but only as me, me, me, which is a little bit kind of a paradox.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  And I also wonder, I mean, I have thousands and thousands of photographs on my phone. What happens to those photographs? I mean, yes, sometimes they are shared, but it is as if the act of taking the photograph of you somewhere means that you were there, rather than the fact that you were there and you had a kind of, in the cases of Auschwitz or the Twin Towers, you had an experience with others who were also there and what the actual site means. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of, there's a kind of very peculiar sense in which

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  we can only be real if we've had, we've had some sort of record of it.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  And even more pitiful, because I thought this was the direction you were going, is, well, after you die.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  Those have to be preserved because they are the record of my life. And I don't, you know, I don't think it's, we're going to see some extraordinary things in the next 50 years or 10 years where our lives are, where we get some measure of immortality through the maintaining, I'm sure it's already out there, please don't send me an email, immortality through our preservation of our digital life. And I get it, you know, a lot of this goes back to my favorite Adam Smith quote, "Man actually desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely." And we desperately want to be loved. And by that, he did not mean romantic love.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  He meant admired, respected, praised. And there are many ways to become loved. He writes about it at great length in The Theory of Immoral Sentiments. But posing in front of Auschwitz is one way to get people to pay attention to you in your circle of Instagram followers, or Twitter fans, or Facebook, et cetera. And what a strange world that is. And it really brings us back full circle to how the book starts and what we talked about earlier of public versus private. In many ways, civilization advances through the exhortation of our culture to do something

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  important that's positive. Invent something, build a business, create a family. And increasingly, we don't find our meaning that way. Some people find it through mass murder, serial killing, it's the way they get attention. We do it through taking pictures of ourselves in iconic places.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  I wonder if there'll be a rebellion against it. It feels like we're moving ever further toward more exposure, exhibitionism. But I just suspect there may be a movement in the other direction. What do you think?

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  I think you can see it. You had a podcast recently about Christianity. And certainly, there's a discussion at the moment about potential rising interest from younger generations. I think that is a search for something beyond the self. I don't know if religion's going to solve that. But I think there's a desire to go beyond the self, for things that are meaningful beyond you, and for some recognition of history, actually. And that is also about not just being this tiny little individual in a timeless space.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  I think some of the things like you were talking about, what happens when we die and the kind of what we preserve. And I think there's a crisis of meaning, really, a crisis of what is important. Historically, it might have been art, or poetry, or bridges, or physical monuments, which were monuments to the nation, or artistic achievement. And that is also about developing a public life that credits what people do when they're

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  their best selves, when they are not just sitting at home washing the dishes, when they are achieving things. And that requires, in some strange way, a greater valuation of human beings. So although we live in quite narcissistic times, we also live in quite misanthropic times, where human beings are seen as, I mean, you get this in discussions around the private sphere, they are seen as abusive, or... Um, just kind of, yeah, bullying. There's a kind of, there's a kind of obsession with the worst side of human beings.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  So not only do we need to kind of be less me obsessed, I think we also need to be a bit more confident about what human beings can achieve beyond their individual selves, maybe when they're working together on a project that they think is important.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  That's lovely.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  You mentioned at one point, The Truman Show, maybe twice. One of my favorite movies, also a very prescient film about what was coming.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  What, what is, I want to contrast it a little bit with The Louds and The Wilkins, and maybe we'll close with this. The, in The Truman Show, no spoilers, but, you know, it's a, it's a man whose entire life is on display. Unlike The Louds, he is unaware of it. And that's what makes the movie so poignant. And it has many other themes that are really, I think, very thought provoking. But what, what's interesting is that what feels like real life to him, to the audience, is a sitcom or a drama.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  And they root for him the way they would the main character in a book or a movie. But it's, it's not a book or movie. It's his real life. And I'm not going to spoil the ending, but the ending is a very harsh judgment of, of how the rest of us look at exhibitionists. And willingly or not, the last, when I say the ending, I mean the last 10 seconds. It's a great, I think it's a great, great movie. But what's interesting is that you're talking about The Louds and The Wilkins, these families that were destroyed by their invitation to the cameras. Of course, correlation is not causation.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  They might have pulled themselves apart without being observed 24/7. They weren't, I was tempted to say they weren't normal, but of course they were. And it's, the interesting question is whether the healthiest of families would, would be able to sustain the, those cameras all seeing an eye. But what I was going to make the observation is that.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Everybody judged them.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Truman, they don't judge. They actually, they root for him. But, and there are probably some people who rooted for the louds, but the loudest people, if I make a bad pun, the loudest people are the ones who revel in ignoring anything redeeming, failing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and reveling in looking down on someone else, and enjoying it, and looking forward to it every week. Not saying, "Oh, I wonder if they'll be able to patch their marriage together", but rather to say, "Well, of course they're breaking up. He's horrible to her, and she's..." whatever.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  And it's just an interesting thing that anonymity, it unleashed, which is what social media has, to some extent, become, is just another example for me of the dangers of this kind of violation of privacy and the costs of it. Reflect on that.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Well, the thing that struck me as you were talking was an extension of what we were saying about people needing some type of visual sense of themselves in the picture to feel real. And I just wonder whether what you see online, and the way in which people now just tear into each other without any sense that these people are real, you're condemning their life, they've made a mistake, have a little bit of sympathy, or at least empathy. There's almost a sense in which we, our society tends to not believe anything anymore as real,

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  because it's all seen as a performance rather than reality. So I don't know if that quite answers your provocation, but there is this real peculiar sense of everything being a performance and nothing being real, that reflects, I suppose, also a kind of an alienation from agency and possibility.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  But it's striking to me

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  how unforgiving we are. And, you know, coming back to Adam Smith, Smith argued that if you weren't lovely, people judged you. And the fact that you want to be judged positively encourages loveliness. And that's a built in feedback loop to good behavior. Bad behavior is judged. If bad behavior is forgiven always and never condemned, that has a terrible cost in my view as well. But this, to me, and this is, I think, doesn't seem to happen in real life, but to me, there should be a good difference between how the state

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  and the law treats you versus how your neighbor and your brother treat you. And you should forgive your brother. Whether the government should forgive, whether the police should forgive your brother for doing something untoward is a legitimate question. But, but you know what's in your own heart. You know your own weaknesses. Although maybe it's just you and me, Tiffany. Maybe everybody else doesn't have these impulses. But when, when I think of these, of judging the Loud family, for example, because we can, because we see a lot, not all, because we don't get all their thoughts. But as we strip them bare and judge their moral flabbiness

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  or their intellectual ugliness, it's just, it's a bad comment on the human species, at least in the anonymity, the realm of anonymity.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think the public realm is the realm of judgment.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Whether it's the law saying you've transgressed, this is our common agreed, you know, this is our common sense of what is right and wrong. You've transgressed that, therefore, off you go to prison. That's a kind of common realm of judgment, equally taste and, yeah, kind of criticism of books. That's a realm of where we have this sort of, or we should have this realm of this kind of, this sense of rules, standards that we agree on.

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  Manners.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Manners.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  And that's where we come together beyond our own private selves and our predilections and all the rest of it as a sort of public and kind of work out how we get along and what we find important. I think that's sort of shoved out of the way at the moment. And instead, we kind of apply that kind of critical judgment to people's private lives. See that, you know, that they're deemed to be more important and valuable and all the rest of it. You see that in the discussions over the artists who behave badly, and sometimes they really do behave badly. But there's more of a discussion in society about their

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  behaviour than there is their work. And so we've applied the kind of the critical gaze to the wrong place, because we all behave slightly badly and oddly and strangely in private. And that's how that's on the basis of which we're judging people. We don't know, we're judging strangers on the basis of their intimate life. And that's, that's something that nobody can kind of survive, because only, you know, the people who judge you in your private life should be your intimates and your friends and all the rest of it, because you have a slightly different form of accountability. And only, only you can,

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  you know, forgive your partner in a way that, you know, somebody watching that your partner on television can't forgive them. They can only judge them as if they are a cartoon character.

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not just the, it's not just that they're your intimate, it's that because they're your intimate, you know their foibles, but you know their strengths. And, and we forgive our lovers and spouses and family because we know them so well, I hope.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And love is, you know, there's an unconditionality about those bonds.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Tiffany Jenkins. Tiffany, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.